What the traders are currently dealing with is the world trade market, and traders need to trade with traders in other countries efficiently and reliably, therefore electronic trading systems are used wider and wider in the international trade practice in recent years.
So far, there are many electronic trading systems used in international trade, such as EDI(Electronic Data Interchange), but EDI is used to help traders to send or receive offer to/from designated traders, it can not be used to help traders to find offers which they are interested
There are trading systems which help traders to find the goods they need from the other traders, or help them to find buyers for their goods, and help them cope with a lot of business related affairs
The task of the trading systems is to match trader's requirements with offers that have been posted by other traders via the electronic trading system. This is normally achieved by doing a direct search of user criteria with the offers available and displaying just the plain results of the search in generic order
Attempt to find the best result in response to criteria specified by users is a very old subject in the information technology So many different methods of query and matching systems have been implemented and is improving every day. Most of the systems are using the industry standard tools for their purpose and their flexibility extends to what those tools can do for them Standard search engines mainly examine the search criteria and the result they produce is a set of zero, one or many cases that match exactly all the conditions of criteria. No matter how many conditions a case has satisfied, if fails in one that case will not be a part of result set, even if the condition is the least important among others Specially with ranges, mainly users might want to have choices that are not exactly complying with what they want but close to that In other words database engines like Informix, Oracle, Sybase, Ingres and others have only two choices for matching cases, "Match" and "No Match".
With the conventional trading system, when a user gives a search criteria, normally an overwhelming amount of information is returned, the user must find out what he is interested in, and if necessary, he may add some more conditions in the criteria, or input a further search criteria or formula, so as to conduct another search to reduce the amount of the information returned. Apparently, he must narrow the results by himself, until he finds a satisfying result He must search from one category to another category, and he must read the information displayed on the screen carefully each time before he selects a new search criteria, and without the user's intervention during the search process, the search can not be conducted successively. On one hand, if the search criteria contains too few conditions, the returned information may be too much, most of which may not be the information he is interested in. On the other hand, if the search criteria contains too many conditions, the user may miss the information which is most important to him, because of failure to satisfy a not so important condition, as described above.
Therefore, the conventional search system is not convenient for the user to use, and can not conduct search efficiently. When a user uses such a system, time and cost consumed in the search process is increased.